I'd have to hear her argument, but...

lousyd@lemmy.sdf.org to Lemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world – 1223 points –
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Thanos' plan was unmitigated garbage anyway.

Humanity reached 4B in 1975 and hit 8B in 2022. On that basis, if half of humanity died when Thanos snapped his fingers 50 years later we'd be back to 8B people again.

——— Edited to billions not millions because I wrote it while under the influence of stupidity.

That is NOT how species replicate. There are many factors where that number comes from. Including food and space to keep them. I read in college the max for humans is something like 10 million. But most scientists think it's a already slowing down due to the struggles everyone deals with.

Building additional supply depots removes the cap

That is not the only factor. But yes it would increase food capacity. But species are very aware of their drain on an eco system. We are starting to become more aware. But we know killing off one bug will effect harvests that effect everything including our food's food.

You mean 10 billion?

Large cities can have more than 10 million people, so I assume you mean the other thing.

Bluntly, half of the occupants of residences would be gone, and their stuff would be up for grabs. It would take a few years to stabilize afterwards, but it would mostly be business as usual for those who survived the snap (apart from the obvious mental trauma).

Enough homes exist for the number of people who live here now, whether those homes are condos, apartments, detached homes, townhouses, or otherwise. A lot of people would be able to move somewhere more permanent, because the housing market would crash pretty hard.

As we refill the homes the population would naturally return to the same level of growth we have seen previously.... So after a few years, maybe a decade, max, humanity would be back on the population train straight to 8B again for sometime between 2050 and 2075.

Humans don't really follow the same population rules as apply to animals, bacteria, or other organisms in general.

I meant 10 billion yes. And this study was specifically for humans. Saying we aren't animals and we don't live by nature's rules just simply isn't factual. We do things a lot differently but no matter what we still have instincts and those instincts drive us. We can't just take out the hardwiring.

We can't take it out, but we can over rule it with reason and logic. We can decide to do something that's not our "natural" choice.

I know plenty of childfree couples, yet our biological drive is to create children to perpetuate our genes in the species.

There's a lot of exceptions to the natural human drives that most people experience.

That is just one example. There are many natural drives that we still use. We eat. We breathe air. We drink water. There are plenty of natural drives that we cannot overcome. We are animals and all animals have things that affect their decisions.

Except fasting, sometimes to the point of death. Food is available but we can choose not to eat it.

Breathing can also be overcome by willpower and sapience, you can hold your breath as long as you like (until you pass out and you lose your sapience by way of being unconscious, and the autonomic systems engage which continue to respirate for you.

People have a choice to drink the same way fasting works.

Even fight or flight can be overcome. A notable example of overcoming some of the most basic instincts is the self immolation that some people have committed where they simply sit and burn rather than react in any other way (screaming, running, stop/drop/rolling, etc). There was a very public and newsworthy instance of this from a monk, who literally sat there, basically mediating while he burned to death.

Pretty much anything that you feel a drive for, can be overcome, as long as you have the sapience and willpower to overcome it. Autonomic functions are basically immutable, so something like breathing is impossible to stop if you are not conscious to actively prevent it.

Sapience and willpower can overcome any natural drive or desire as we see fit.

I will recognize that getting people to agree to do something on a mass scale is generally impossible. Like herding cats.... It's doubly hard when that thing goes against their more basic desires.

It's been known to happen, but the instances are few IMO. Something like reproduction however, without a law or government mandate, it would be hard to prevent people from making more people and growing the population. Most notable example of this is countries where there are limits on how many children you can have. They're successful, with some fairly horrendous stories of the consequence of non-compliance, and horror stories of what people have done to try to abide by the laws while still having what they desire (perhaps a child of a certain gender?).

One of the natural drives is to have children. Multiple of them. Some, like me and my friends, have chosen not to do that. Sapience > natural drive. Limiting how many children a person may have is difficult, as we've witnessed from the countries that tried it, so making MORE children because we have the room/resources for it becomes a more natural outcome if the population was suddenly cut in half.

Hell, if such a thing happened, and by some miracle my partner and I both survived the culling, I'd have a serious conversation with them about maybe changing our minds on the childfree thing. But that's a discussion that won't happen because Thanos isn't real and can't hurt us.

Are.. you high? You know that back when I last checked in 2020ish there were 8 billion people, right? Maybe that's what you meant

Edit surely you had to have meant that. The US alone has almost half a billion people. Most countries have well over that number so I'm attributing it to mistype

They might not be a native English speaker. In my language (Norwegian), the word for “billion” is “milliard”. I think that’s also the case in German.

That's obviously what they meant. There was probably some translation error. Just cut people some slack, everyone makes small mistakes from time to time. There's a few (atleast 2) languages where the native word for billion starts with an m and the word for trillion starts with a b.

Yeah that's why I added my edit.

I shouldn't have led with the "are you high" either. Yesterday was a bad day for me. My apologies to the commenter.

Oops. Yup, utter failed to put Bs! Put it down to not having had enough coffee today!